All the Time in the World (15 page)

You Yourself are a word, though deemed by some to be unutterable,

You are said to be The Word, and I don’t doubt You are the Last Word.

You’re the Lord our Narrator, who made a text from nothing, at least that is our story of You.

So here is Your servant, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Pemberton, the almost no longer rector of St. Timothy’s, Episcopal, addressing You in one of Your own inventions, one of Your intonational systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills.

Will You show him no mercy, this poor soul tormented in his nostalgia for Your Only Begotten Son? He has failed his training as a detective, having solved nothing.

May he nevertheless pursue You? God? The Mystery?

W
HEN BETTY TOLD ME SHE WOULD GO THAT NIGHT TO
Walter John Harmon, I didn’t think I reacted. But she looked into my eyes and must have seen something—some slight loss of vitality, a moment’s dullness of expression. And she understood that for all my study and hard work, the Seventh Attainment was still not mine.

Dearest, she said, don’t be discouraged. The men have more difficulty. Walter John Harmon knows that and commends your struggle. You can go see him if you wish, it is the prerogative of husbands.

No, I said, I’m all right.

AFTER SHE HAD GONE
I went walking in the evening light across the pastures. It is beautiful country here, a broad undulant valley with brooks and natural ponds and no ground light to dim the stars or the moving lights of the jets up among them. This is where the Holy City will descend. The community has in just two short years assembled the parcels of this valley. I did some real estate law back in Charlotte and I am proud to say I have had no small hand in our accomplishment. It is in the nature of a miracle that Walter John Harmon has in his effortless way drawn so many of us to his prophecy. And that we have given everything we possess—not to him, to the Demand that comes through him. We are not idiots.
We are not cult victims. In many quarters we are laughed at for following as God’s prophet a garage mechanic who in his teens was imprisoned for car theft. But this blessed man has revolutionized our lives. From the first moment I was in his presence I felt resolved in my soul. Everything was suddenly right. I was who I was. It is hard to explain. I saw the outside world darkened, as in a film negative. But I was in the light. And that I was blessed seemed to be established in his eyes. Walter’s pale blue eyes are set so deep under the ridge of his brow that the irises are occluded at the top, like half-moons. It is almost a chilling gaze you feel on you, as gentle as it may be, something not of this world but ineffable, expressive of God, like the gaze of an animal.

So I knew the failing within me when Betty was this night summoned for Purification. Walter is at a level beyond lust. This is apparent, since all the wives, even the plainest, partake of his communion. His ministry annuls the fornications of a secular society. Betty and I, for example, made love many times before we were married. And the Community’s children, the children in white, who have never known carnal sin, are not permitted to look at Walter John Harmon lest he inspire them to their confusion. They are the precious virgins, girls and boys, whose singing brings him such joy. He says nothing to them, of course, but smiles and closes those remarkable eyes, and the tears stream from them like rain down a windowpane.

BETTY AND I LEARNED
about Walter John Harmon from the Internet. I found myself reading someone’s weblog—how that happened I can’t remember. I think of it now as the beginning of His summons, for there is nothing without significance in this world made by God. I called Betty and she came into my study and together we read of this most remarkable event of the tornado that
had occurred the year before in the town of Fremont in west Kansas. There were links, too, all from this locality and all telling the same story. I logged in to the archives of the regional newspapers and confirmed that there had been a series of tornadoes all through the state at that time, and a particularly destructive twister that had hit Fremont head-on. But beyond that not one news report had the key thing. Not even in the Fremont
Sun-Ledger
was there an account of this one inexplicable occurrence of the cyclone that came through the middle of town, flinging cars into the air, shattering storefronts, lifting houses off their foundations, and, among other disasters, setting off a gas-and-oil fire that pooled on the floor of the repair shop of the Getty station on the corner of Railroad and Division streets, where Walter John Harmon worked as a mechanic.

I hold in my mind a composite account of what happened, from the weblogs and from what we have since heard recounted by the townspeople who witnessed this or that particular moment and who followed Walter in his ministry and are now the Community Elders. Walter John Harmon himself has not been persuaded to write down a testament, nor has he permitted anything to be written in the way of documentation. “It is not the time for that,” he says. And then, “May it never be the time, for the day we falter and lose our way, that will be the time.” In fact nothing in the Community is written. The Ideals, the Imperatives, the Assignments and Obligations are all pronounced, and once spoken by the prophet are carried and remembered by means of daily prayer. The miracles of the tornado are held in the imaginations of our minds and we speak of them to one another in our workday or social gatherings, so that as the years pass there will be a Consensus of the inner truth and its authority will be unquestionable.

As he stood by the pool of fire, the garage doors first, and then the roof and then the collapsed walls, were lifted and spun into the
black funnel. Only Walter John Harmon stood where he stood, and then was slowly raised in his standing and turned slowly in his turning, calmly and silently, his arms stretched wide in the black shrieking, with the things of our lives whirling in the whirlwind above him—car fenders and machines from the Laundromat, hats and empty coats and trousers, tables, mattresses, plates and knives and forks, TV sets and computers, all malignantly alive in the black howling. And then a child flew into Walter John Harmon’s left arm and another fell into his right arm, and he held them steadfast and was lowered to the ground where he had stood. And then the dreaded wind that takes all breath away was gone, having blown itself to bits. And the fields beyond the town were strewn with the several dead and dying among their possessions. But the pool of fire in the Getty garage was nothing but a ring of blackened concrete, and the sun was out as if the tornado had never been, and the mothers of those two children came running and found them bruised and bleeding and crying but alive. Only then did Walter John Harmon begin again to breathe, though he stood where he stood, unable to move as if in a trance, until he collapsed and lost consciousness.

All of this is in the Consensus. Other elements of the miracle are still debated by the Community and I suppose come under the heading of apocrypha. One of the Elders, Ansel Bernes, who had owned a clothing store, claims that seven mercury streetlamps on the walking street in the Fremont business district came on and stayed on when the tornado hit. I can’t quite accept this. According to the
Sun-Ledger
, Fremont’s power outage was total. It took the local utility two days to get everyone back online.

WHEN WE CAME
here Betty and I had been married a dozen years with no children to show for it. One of the appeals of the Community
is that we are all parents of all children. While the adults live in distinct quarters of their own, as in the outer world, the children room together in the main house. At present we are a hundred ten in number, with a human treasury of seventy-eight children, ranging in age from two to fifteen.

Except for the main house, which was once a retreat for elderly nuns of the Roman Catholic persuasion and to which we have added a new wing, all the Community buildings were built by members according to the specifications of Walter John Harmon. He called for square, box-like structures with gable roofs for the adult houses, each of which contains two apartments of two rooms each. His own residence is slightly larger, with a gambrel roof, which gives it the appearance of a barn. All buildings in the complex are painted white; no colors are permitted exterior or interior. Metal fixtures are not allowed—window frames are wood, all water is drawn by hand from wells, there is no indoor plumbing, and communal showers, men’s and women’s, are jerry-rigged in tents. Walter John Harmon has said: “We praise what is temporary, we cherish the impermanent, for there can be no comparison with what is coming that is not an impiety.”

But in the business suite in the new wing of the main house we do have computers, faxes, copiers, and so on, powered by a gasoline generator behind the building, though we intend when it is practical to switch to solar cells. There are metal filing cabinets as well. All of this is by dispensation because, regrettably, we do have necessary business with the outside world. We handle legal challenges from state and county officials and must deal also with private suits brought by unthinking or opportunistic relations of our family members. But only the Community lawyers, and Elder Rafael Altman, our financial officer and CPA, and his bookkeepers, and the women who provide clerical help, can enter these premises. Three of us practice law, and after morning prayers we
go to work just like everyone else. By dispensation we own the habiliments of the legal profession—suits, shirts, ties, polished shoes, which we don for those occasions when we must meet with our counterparts in the world outside. We are driven by horse and wagon to the Gate down at the paved road some two miles away. There we have the choice of the three parked SUVs, though never the Hummer. The Hummer is reserved for Walter John Harmon. He does not proselytize, but he does schedule spiritual meetings on the outside. Or he will attend ecumenical or scholarly conferences on this or that religious or social issue. He is never invited to participate but is eloquent enough sitting quietly in the audience in his robe, his head bowed, his face almost hidden in the fall of his hair and his hands folded under his chin.

BETTY RETURNED
early the next morning, the sun coming with her through the door, and I welcomed her with a hug. I meant it, too—I love seeing her face in the morning. She is very fair and rises from her sleep with her cheeks flushed like a child’s and her hazel eyes instantly alert to the day. She is as lithe and fit as she was when she played field hockey at college. If you look closely some tiny lines radiate from the corners of her eyes, but this only makes her more attractive to me. Her hair is still the color of wheat and she still wears it short, as she did when I met her, and she still has that spring to her step and her typically energetic way of doing things.

We prayed together and then we had our bread and tea, chatting all the while. Betty served as a Community teacher, she had the kindergarten, and she was talking about her day’s plan. I was feeling better. It was a beautiful day dawning with coverlets of white webbing on the grass. I had a renewed confidence in my own feelings.

All at once the most hideous carnal images arose in my mind. I wanted to speak but could not catch my breath.

What is it, Jim, what?

Betty held my hand. I closed my eyes until the images disappeared and I could breathe again.

Oh my dear one, she said. Last night was not the first time, after all. And have our lives changed? I’m telling you it is not a normal human experience with any of the normal results.

I don’t want to hear about it. It is not necessary for me to hear about it.

It is no more, or no less, than a sacrament. It is no more than when the priest placed the wafer on our tongues.

I held my hand up. Betty looked at me inquiringly, as in the old days, a pretty bird with its head cocked, wondering who I could possibly be.

You know, she said, I had to tell Walter John Harmon. You should go see him. Look how your mouth is set, so hard, so angry.

It was not for you to tell him, I said.